One of the jokes of our era is the Republican Party’s claim that it
favors “small government.” An accurate description might go more like
this: the present-day Republican Party (libertarians excepted) has never
seen an oppressive power of the national security state it didn’t want
to bolster or grow. And it loves big government — the bigger the better —
as long as we’re talking about the military-industrial complex. Mitt
Romney, for instance, is eager to build ever more naval vessels, increase the size of U.S. ground forces, and up by an extra $2 trillion or more
over the next decade the Pentagon’s already staggering budget. As the
Bush administration proved and the Obama administration emphasized,
stimulus packages, including massive infrastructural projects, are fine
and dandy when pursued in Baghdad (biggest embassy
on Earth) or Afghanistan (most bases ever). Consider it an irony, that
even undocumented aliens are a Republican “go,” if they happen to be
part of the semi-slave labor force that helps to build and service American bases in war zones abroad.

And lest anyone claim that we’re now a can’t-do nation with a
can’t-do government, it’s simply not true. Increasingly true, however,
is that governmental “doing” only happens these days when the U.S.
military is doing it. This is, of course, the definition of a militarizing society.
And yet, let’s face it, the Pentagon’s ability to create infrastructure
remains impressive — and something Americans know remarkably little
about.

Take today’s piece by TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse: to
build untold hundreds of bases, some humongous, in a poverty-stricken,
landlocked country (with few building resources of its own) thousands of
miles from ours is little short of stunning. In fact, thought of a
certain way, the whole American way of war has the same quality. Take
the largest base built in Iraq, the ill-named Camp Victory with a
27-mile perimeter. Housing 40,000 military personnel and 20,000
contractors, it had,
among the usual brand-name fast-food restaurants, Internet cafes, and
PXes, “a reverse osmosis water plant that could generate 1.85 million
gallons a day, an ice plant, a 50-megawatt power generating station,
stadium-sized chow halls, and a laundromat with 3,000 machines able to
do 36,000 loads a day.”

Since any style of warfare emerges from the society that spawns it,
we shouldn’t be surprised that we carry our particular version of a
consumer society to war with us. Think, for instance, of the final
withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, when the U.S. military shipped out much of
what we had brought in with us. That turned out to be an estimated three million objects,
ranging from tanks and laptop computers to toilets and tables (with at
least another four million objects turned over to the Iraqis, “including
89,000 air conditioners worth $18.5 million”).

Now, as if to remind us of the profligate nature of the American way
of war, comes the news that to withdraw U.S. combat troops from
Afghanistan by the end of 2014, the U.S. military may have to send in
extra troops to sort through the more than $60 billion worth of
equipment and materiel that needs to leave with them. Think of it not as
an urge but a surge to depart,
and a part of the general madness of war, American-style, in these last
years. Those extra troops will, by the way, be sending out at least
200,000 shipping containers and vehicles.

Big government? It couldn’t get bigger. Can-do, you bet. Successful? Not for a second.
Maybe the next time Washington wants to build the biggest embassy on
Earth and hundreds of bases, large and small, it should do so here and
create a few of the fantasy 12 million jobs Mitt Romney is promising Americans. Tom

Afghanistan’s Base Bonanza

Total tops Iraq at that war’s heightby Nick Turse

Afghanistan may turn out to be one of the great misbegotten “stimulus
packages” of the modern era, a construction boom in the middle of
nowhere with materials largely shipped in at enormous expense to no
lasting purpose whatsoever. With the U.S. military officially drawing
down its troops there, the Pentagon is now evidently reversing the
process and embarking on a major deconstruction program. It’s tearing up tarmacs, shutting down outposts,
and packing up some of its smaller facilities. Next year, the number of
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition bases in the
southwest of the country alone is scheduled to plummet from 214 to 70, according to the New York Times.

But anyone who wanted to know just what the Pentagon built in
Afghanistan and what it is now tearing down won’t have an easy time of
it.

At the height of the American occupation of Iraq, the United States had 505 bases there, ranging from small outposts to mega-sized air bases.
Press estimates at the time, however, always put the number at about
300. Only as U.S. troops prepared to leave the country was the actual —
startlingly large — total reported.
Today, as the U.S. prepares for a long drawdown from Afghanistan, the
true number of U.S. and coalition bases in that country is similarly
murky, with official sources offering conflicting and imprecise figures.
Still, the available numbers for what the Pentagon built since 2001 are
nothing short of staggering.

Despite years of talk about American withdrawal,
there has in fact been a long-term building boom during which the
number of bases steadily expanded. In early 2010, the U.S.-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed that it had
nearly 400 Afghan bases. Early this year, that number had grown to 450. Today, a military spokesperson tells TomDispatch, the total tops out at around 550.

And that may only be the tip of the iceberg.

When you add in ISAF checkpoints — those small baselets used to
secure roads and villages — to the already bloated number of mega-bases,
forward operating bases, combat outposts, and patrol bases, the number
jumps to 750. Count all foreign military installations of every type,
including logistical, administrative, and support facilities, and the
official count offered by ISAF Joint Command reaches a whopping 1,500
sites. Differing methods of counting probably explain at least some of
this phenomenal rise over the course of this year. Still, the new
figures suggest one conclusion that should startle: no matter how you
tally them, Afghan bases garrisoned by U.S.-led forces far exceed the 505 American bases in Iraq at the height of that war.

Bases of Confusion

There is much confusion surrounding the number of ISAF bases in Afghanistan. Recently, the Associated Press reported
that as of October 2011, according to spokesman Lieutenant Colonel
David Olson, NATO was operating as many as 800 bases in Afghanistan, but
has since closed 202 of them and transferred another 282 to Afghan
control. As a result, the AP claims that NATO is now operating only
about 400 bases, not the 550 to 1,500 bases reported to me by ISAF.

This muddled basing picture and a seeming failure by the U.S. and its
international partners to keep an accurate count of their bases in the
country has been a persistent feature of the Afghan conflict. Some of
the discrepancies may result from terminology or from the confusion that
can result from communications in any international coalition. ISAF,
NATO, and the U.S. military all seem to keep different counts. Mainly,
however, the incongruities appear to stem from fundamental issues of
record-keeping — of, in particular, a lack of interest in chronicling
just how extensively Afghanistan has been garrisoned.

In January 2010, for example, Colonel Wayne Shanks, an ISAF
spokesman, told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases
in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat
outposts. He assured me that he only expected that number to increase by
12 or a few more over the course of that year.

In September 2010, I contacted ISAF’s Joint Command Public Affairs
Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that “there are
approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military
installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields.” Perplexed by the apparent
loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a
public affairs officer with the International Security Assistance Force.
“There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan,” he wrote in an
October 2010 email. “There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan.”

By then, it seemed, ISAF had lost up to 150 bases and I was
thoroughly confused. When I contacted the military to sort out the
discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given — from Shanks’s
400 base tally to the count of around 250 by Younger — I was handed off
again and again until I ended up with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at
ISAF Joint Command’s Public Affairs Office. “The number of bases in
Afghanistan is roughly 411,” Brown wrote in a November 2010 email,
“which is a figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the
Combat Out Post-level.”

If the numbers supplied by Olson to the Associated Press are to be
believed, then between November 2010 and October 2011, the number of
foreign military bases in Afghanistan nearly doubled, from 411 to about
800. Then, if official figures are again accurate, those numbers
precipitously dropped by nearly 350 in just four months.

In February of this year, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs told me that there were only 451
ISAF bases in Afghanistan. In July, the ISAF Joint Command Press Desk
informed me that the number of bases was now 550, 750, or 1,500,
depending on what facilities you chose to count, while NATO’s Olson and
the Associated Press put the number back down at the January 2010 figure
of around 400. TomDispatch did not receive a response to a request for
further clarification from a spokesman for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan
before this article went to press.

Reconciling the numbers may never be possible or particularly
edifying. Whatever the true current count of bases, it seems beyond
question that the number has far exceeded the level reached in Iraq at
the height of the conflict in that country. And while the sheer quantity
of ISAF bases in Afghanistan may be shrinking, don’t think
deconstruction is all that’s going on. There is still plenty of building
underway.

The Continuing Base Buildup

In 2011, it was hardly more than an empty lot: a few large metal
shipping containers sitting on a bed of gravel inside a
razor-wire-topped fence at Kandahar Air Field, the massive American base
in southern Afghanistan. When I asked about it this spring, the
military was tight-lipped, refusing to discuss plans for the facility.
But construction is ongoing and sometime next year, as I’ve previously reported,
that once-vacant lot is slated to be the site of a two-story concrete
intelligence facility for America’s drone war. It will boast almost
7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large
“processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center.

The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility under construction is
just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has
planned or underway there. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing down
or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of
combat operations slowing, as well as a plan for the withdrawal of
American combat forces, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much
longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram, a gigantic air base
about 40 miles north of Kabul. “Bagram is going through a significant
transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant
Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office
told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication, last
year. “We’re transitioning… into a long-term, five-year, 10-year
vision for the base.”

According to contract solicitation documents released earlier this
year and examined by TomDispatch, plans are in the works for a Special
Operations Forces’ Joint Operations Center at Kandahar Air Field. The
3,000-square-meter facility — slated to include offices for commanders,
conference rooms, training areas, and a secure communications room —
will serve as the hub for future special ops missions in southern and
western Afghanistan, presumably after the last U.S. “combat troops” leave
the country at the end of 2014.

Thus far in 2012, no fewer than eight contracts have been awarded for
the construction of facilities ranging from a command and control
center and a dining hall to barracks and a detention center at either
Kandahar or Bagram. Just one of these contracts covered seven separate
Air Force projects at Bagram that are slated to be completed in 2013,
including the construction of a new headquarters facility, a control
room, and a maintenance facility for fighter aircraft.

Improvements and expansions are planned for other bases as well.
Documents examined by TomDispatch shed light on a $10 to $25 million
construction project at Camp Marmal near Mazar-e-Sharif in Balkh
Province on the Uzbekistan and Tajikistan borders. Designated as a
logistics hub for the north of the country, the base will see a
significant expansion of its infrastructure including an increase in
fuel storage capacity, new roads, an upgraded water distribution system,
and close to 150 acres of space for stowing equipment and other cargo.
According to David Lakin, a spokesman for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, a
contract for work on the base will be awarded by the end of the year
with an expected completion date in the summer of 2013.

Base World

Even before the new figures on basing in Afghanistan were available,
it was known that the U.S. military maintained a global inventory of
more than 1,000 foreign bases. (By some counts, around 1,200 or more.) It’s possible that no one knows for sure. Numbers are increasing rapidly in Africa and Latin America and, as is clear from the muddled situation in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has been known to lose count of its facilities.

Of those 505 U.S. bases in Iraq, some today have been stripped clean by Iraqis, others have become ghost towns. One former prison base — Camp Bucca — became a hotel, and another former American post is now a base for some members of an Iranian “terrorist” group.
It wasn’t supposed to end this way. But while a token number of U.S.
troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain in
Baghdad, the Iraqi government thwarted American dreams of keeping
long-term garrisons in the center of the Middle East’s oil heartlands.

Clearly, U.S. planners are having similar dreams about the long-term
garrisoning of Afghanistan. Whether the fate of those Afghan bases will
be similar to Iraq’s remains unknown, but with as many as 550 of them
still there — and up to 1,500 installations when you count assorted
ammunition storage facilities, barracks, equipment depots, checkpoints,
and training centers — it’s clear that the U.S. military and its
partners are continuing to build with an eye to an enduring military
presence.

Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will
endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy. What that will
ultimately mean in terms of blood, treasure, and possibly blowback
remains to be seen.

Good article. But I can't help but ask why it keeps mentioning Romney and Republicans They'll be plenty of time to assail Romney and Republicans IF Romney is elected.

As of now, this is an Obama issue. Democrats controlled Congress from 2006 to 2010, and the Oval Office from 2008 til now. They never met a war spending bill they didn't pass, and by all accounts Afghanistan is Obama's war. There hasn't been any significant roll back of the MIC (Military Industrial Complex) under the Obama administration, and in many areas there has been extensive expansion. Particularly areas that are outside of any significant congressional oversight.